Eating Up Life in Lima: Remote Year Month 3

Lima is where my life was supposed to get sorted out. It was March and my jaw had healed, so I was relearning how to chew and gearing up to get my teeth fixed. I was going to drum up new business and focus on my writing. In Lima, I was going to get my shit together.

That’s not quite how it worked.

My doctor in Argentina had said I was ready to have the metal bars removed from my mouth, but the first clinic I visited in Lima disagreed. So Lima was another series of medical appointments and X-rays and not doing enough paid work while I tried to fix my face and get comfortable in a new city. And getting comfortable doesn’t happen right away.

We arrived in Lima in the dark, so our first impressions were incomplete and they weren’t visual. Instead, we processed the sound of speeding cars and blasting horns and the smell of exhaust and the salt of the ocean. The mix was surreal, as was the view of city lights at the edge of an ocean we...